Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan

by Ferguson, Will

  Anyway, by the time Grandma did finally, slowly, creakingly come to a halt, the young hitchhiker was barely a dot in the distance. I looked back and saw him running toward us, overjoyed, his guitar bouncing on his back and his long blond hair flapping.

  “Wow, Grandma. You stopped for a hitchhiker.”

  “Well,” she said, “normally I wouldn’t. But it is getting late and I don’t like to see a young lady out on the road after dark. It isn’t safe.”

  “Woman? That isn’t a woman.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No, it’s a hippie.”

  “Oh, well. I didn’t realize.” And then—so help me God—she pulled away just as the hitchhiker, panting and grinning, arrived at the side of the car. He was reaching for the handle and we looked at each other as we slid apart. His smile stayed frozen on his face, but his eyes were filled with incomprehension. I gave him a sympathetic “Sorry, but what can I do?” sort of shrug as Grandma and I left him behind.

  In the distance we could see him screaming and shouting and flinging his jacket about and kicking up gravel and giving us the finger.

  “Look at that,” said Grandma with a tut. “It’s just as well we didn’t stop for him. He’s a lunatic.”

  I loved my grandmother, I truly did. But we accrued some heavy karma that day, karma that may take several lifetimes to escape and which—even now, as a hitchhiker myself—I am slowly working off.

  —

  Mr. Tawaraya eventually did find me a room. We ended up driving to the next community, a small seaside village named Atsuta which looked even more deserted than Ishikari—if such a thing is possible—but which did have an inn. It was one of those small-town everything shops: a bed-and-breakfast minshuku, a restaurant, a liquor store, a barber shop.

  “No, no, he’s not on a fishing trip. No, he isn’t a birdwatcher. He isn’t with anyone. He’s alone.”

  Mr. Tawaraya was negotiating on my behalf. After long pauses, much teeth-sucking, several rounds of bows, and a flutter of insincere smiles, it was finally decided that the owners of the establishment would agree to take my money.

  My business card helped. “Nexus?” they said. “Very good corporation. Very good.” I threw in Donner’s business card as well, citing him as my personal reference. (And the cool thing is, Donner, being an American, would have gone along with it. “Sure I know him, upstanding citizen. What was his name again?”)

  The owner and his wife treated me with a certain guarded respect, much like people treat a tame puma. I sat alone in the dining room, turning the inn’s matchbox over in my hand. Sure enough, there was a different ad on each of three sides: one for the B&B, one for the café, and one for the hair salon. All run by one family. They were the Rockefellers of Atsuta.

  Word must have leaked out about my arrival, because during supper a cyclone of children came scrambling in shouting, “Is it true? Is it!” only to stop dead in their tracks with a cartoon-like skid on the cement floor.

  “Hello,” I said, and they scattered like birds. Feeling weary, I turned to the owner. “Surely I’m not the first foreigner to stay in this inn?”

  “Well, we did have one other. An Englishman. He stayed here one night. Spoke Japanese fluently. He was walking, all the way from Cape Sōya.”

  I choked back my squid. “When was that?”

  “Oh, fifteen, sixteen years ago. Maybe more.”

  “An Englishman,” I said. “Walking?”

  “That’s right.”

  On this lonely coast, miles from the nearest large town, it could have only been one person: Alan Booth. Alan walked the length of Japan and wrote a now-classic travel narrative about his trip entitled The Roads to Sata. I had always wanted to meet Alan, just to thank him for being a writer, but he died of cancer in 1993. He was forty-seven.

  And here I was, in the very same inn. Perhaps dining at the same table. Talking to the same people he had talked to.

  “The Englishman,” said the owner, “did you know him?”

  “No. I mean, yes. I knew of him. His work. He was a writer.”

  “Was he?” The owner smiled. Teeth of gold. “Isn’t that something.”

  His wife had been listening and she now butted in. “He wasn’t a writer, he was a student,” she said. “A college student. From America. And he wasn’t walking, he was riding a bicycle.”

  “But—”

  “An Englishman,” insisted the owner, and they eventually had to call on his uncle to resolve the dispute.

  “He was Australian,” said the uncle. “And he wasn’t riding a bicycle, he was driving a motorcycle. Clear across Japan he was.”

  As quickly as my excitement had mounted, it now dissipated. Had Alan Booth stayed here? I knew for a fact that he followed this coast, but had he spent the night in this inn? Or was it someone else? It was all very confusing. That’s the problem with memory, it turns into myth so easily.

  That night, I fell asleep to the sound of a tired sea, pounding, pounding, pounding against the shore, like a lover past caring, fatigued. I was feeling disconnected. Untethered.

  I thought of Marion, back in Scotland. I thought of Alan Booth’s fight with cancer and my own quixotic pursuit of flowers.

  The rains never came.

  12

  SOME PÉNSEES concerning the human thumb:

  It always seemed significant to me that the sole tool of the hitchhiker is his or her thumb, that one single digit which made civilization and human society possible. When we hold out our opposable thumb, we are displaying that which distinguishes us from all other mammals. A thumb asks and expects acts of kindness by the very virtue of being human. When we hail a taxi we use our index finger—I, the pointer, the finger of business and money. But the thumb is a free ride, bold, an affirmation. “Thumbs up!”

  This was a wonderful theory, finely spun, and I enjoyed dishing it out to whoever would listen—and often without the least bit of prompting (I’m something of a philanthropist that way). Then I met a professor from Cambridge who nodded thoughtfully at my inductive reasoning and, with a single pinprick, punctured it like an over-inflated beachball.

  “The opposable thumb is not a symbol of movement,” he said. “It’s a symbol of stability. A symbol of invention. Without such a thumb, we couldn’t have constructed complex tools or learned to sow the ground or plow the fields or build cities. The thumb is a symbol of the settler, the townsman. It is the toe, the big toe, that makes us capable of upright walking. It is this toe that makes long journeys on foot possible. We rise up above the grasslands because of our big toe. It is that which made humans capable of such remarkable feats of migration. We walked everywhere, to the far corners of the earth. It is the big toe that is the symbol of the traveller. Not the thumb.”

  “It’s the thumb versus the toe?” I asked.

  “Exactly. The settler versus the traveller. The farmer versus the nomad. Our two primal urges: the nesting instinct versus the migratory.” Those who stay at home and those who don’t.

  My chest slowly deflated. The thumb is a powerful, Romanesque symbol, strong, assertive, proud—but the toe, the big toe? Not the romantic image I was looking for.

  13

  THE PORT CITY of Rumoi: a gang of Russian sailors blusters by, speaking in backward r’s and lower-case capitals. They are wearing genuine Russian sweaters and appropriately brooding expressions. They look like extras in a Soviet montage.

  “Borscht!” I said in greeting as they passed. “Kasparov Kremlin.” But these Russians were clearly uneducated Russians, for they failed to understand me even when I was speaking their own language, and they went scowling past without reply.

  What can you say when you meet a Russian? “Here’s to the end of the Cold War, shame about your country”? “Steal any good bicycles lately?” “So what ever happened to that dialectical materialism, anyway?”

  I caught a ride to Rumoi with a barber-supply salesman named Sato Isoichi. Sato was a warm-hearted man, stout and solid, with a
bristled haircut and a square jaw. He reminded me of a gruff but friendly high-school gym teacher. I dubbed him Coach. We got along well, but his route took him from small barbershop to barbershop along the way, and the cumulative effect was so sad my heart started to ache. I’m not sure why, but something about getting glimpses into the lives of so many people living in obscurity, cutting hair behind faded façades where the barber poles were sun-bleached to the point of being pastel renditions rather than eye-catching totems—it was all too much. One woman in her mid-years, her hair and clothes carefully attended to, came out and waved to me in the car. Sato had been inside and had told her about me. Behind, in her tiny shop, I could see a single mirror and an empty chair. She bought one small bottle of hair tonic.

  Sato was a popular man, and clearly his visit was the highlight of the week for many of his customers. Self-effacing, friendly, always making time to chat, he worked his way slowly up the back of Hokkaido and then down again once a week. He was in his fifties and had two daughters, both in their twenties, both now living in Sapporo.

  I have to be careful; I don’t want to paint a Willy Loman portrait where none existed. Sato lived a semi-nomadic life, true, but he was closer to Tora-san, the wandering hero of Japanese popular cinema, than to Arthur Miller’s salesman. When I compared Sato to Tora-san he laughed. “But Tora-san has no children, no home. My life is not as sad as Tora’s. You”—he said with a smile—“you are more like Tora-san.”

  “But I have a family, I have a home,” I said a little too sharply.

  “Of course you do.” His voice was now conciliatory, which only made me feel worse.

  Sato picked me up in Hamamasu, which was little more than a name on a map. Above Hamamasu the highway hugged the coast, at times it was the coast, as we went up and around a great bulge of land where seabirds nested on the cliffs.

  Hamamasu North appeared (there had barely been a Hamamasu), which was a pocket of blue rooftops huddled in a small cove along the beach. Sato took me down a twisty dirt road for a better view of the sea, through a ghost town where the houses were boarded up and falling down.

  Sato followed the shore north to Rumoi. Flaccid, rancid, rusting Rumoi, spread out this way and that, a city filmed in sepia where the playgrounds were patches of brown grass and the ships bled rust into the harbour. Everything needed a new coat of paint. Even the sky. Especially the sky. I felt like grabbing a can of bright yellow latex and running around madly dabbing it onto surfaces. It was such a melancholy, beat-about place. If Hakodate was Russian in style, Rumoi was Russian in its soul. Even the name sounded Russian: Rumoi.

  The Russians were in town all right. They had graduated from bicycles and were now stealing cars. They would roll them onto ships in the night and whisk them away to Siberia, though how much truth there was in this was hard to say. If you ask me, it smacks of urban legend.

  Sato gave me an informal tour of Rumoi barbershops. We drove up one dusty road and down another, and every shop looked sad and wistful. More glimpses into strangers’ lives. A procession of faces and smiles from the roadside. Along the way, I saw an old man delivering newspapers in a rickshaw. A rickshaw, mind you. In Rumoi, the question was not what city were you in, but what century.

  I got dropped off on the north side of town, across a flat, muddy river that sloughed its way to the sea. Concrete seawalls created a backwater, brackish and sewer green, and a miasma of swamp gas lingered in the air. I couldn’t wait to get out of Rumoi.

  From where I stood, I counted five lighthouses at various points around the harbour entrance. This puzzled me. There was no way Rumoi needed five different lighthouses; the bay wasn’t that tricky. I couldn’t help but think there was more to it than mere navigation. It was a product of yearning, a way of signalling to the world that we are still here on the far edge of a northern island, the lighthouse lights turning round and round like a prayer wheel. Please come. Please. Please come. Please.

  14

  I’M NOT SURE WHY, but just outside of Shosanbetsu I ran out of steam.

  It was a small, nondescript village, just a cluster of homes really, but I felt the irrational urge to stop. To turn around. The cape was less than a day’s travel away; I knew I had made it, knew I could make it. So why go on?

  I had climbed my way up the coast, one rung at a time, from one obscure town to the other, and here, north of Shosanbetsu, my momentum had finally faltered.

  The sea was throwing wild crashes of wave up across the side of the highway. They came in like cannonballs, again and again, and the trucks drove through with their wipers on. Above me, on a grassy hill, stood a lone Shinto shrine facing the sea. I walked up an overgrown path to offer a coin and a prayer. The torii was faded from salt water and time, and behind it, past the downward slope of a hill, was a small village. I sat down on the steps of the shrine.

  A crow had settled on the torii gate crossbeams. The wind was sweeping through the grass, carrying the smell of dust and straw. I could hear the sea, throwing itself against the highway, and it echoed, like the sound of a distant battle.

  Something moved, something just beneath the surface—like a vein under skin.

  We chart our lives in graphs, in erratic heartbeats up and down. We live our lives in motion, trailing former selves behind us like the images in a strobe-light photograph. And yet, the nature of motion—that primary aspect of our existence—eludes us.

  Through a series of logical paradoxes, the pre-Socratic philosopher Zeno proved that motion was nothing more than an illusion. But it was Zeno’s logic that was the illusion, not motion. Motion remains a brute force—perhaps the brute force—of nature. The philosopher Heraclitus, in contrast, defined the very universe in terms of motion. “We never step into the same river twice. All is in flux.”

  We are in flux as well, and the same person never steps into the river twice, either.

  In the Inuktitut language of the Far North, the Inuit make a key distinction between objects at rest and objects in motion. An object that is moving extends itself across a landscape. It is a different substance, a different thing when it stops moving. Motion does not describe the object, it defines it. When a bear moving across an ice floe stops, it becomes something else entirely, and a different word is used to describe it.

  When in motion, you do extend yourself across a landscape. The danger, of course, is that it cuts both ways; when the traveller stops moving, he ceases to exist.

  15

  KATSUYA WAS in his late forties, but he had a youthful, shaggy haircut. “I’m an English teacher,” he said. “A private tutor. I also sell textbooks. Here, let me give you my card.” He fished one out from the inside pocket of his blazer. “You never know.”

  He smoked With Class, a brand of cigarette I knew quite well, even though I don’t smoke. On the front of every pack of With Class cigarettes is printed the following message in English:

  WITH CLASS: Defined as an expression of true sophistication intellectuality and appreciation for equality by trend-setting independent people creating new customs for life enjoyment.

  “So you’re an English teacher, you say?”

  “Yup.” He pulled back on his cigarette like a college student latching onto a joint. “Hokkaido is all right,” he said. “I’m from Tokyo originally, but I’ve gotten used to living out here in the sticks. It’s a very conservative area. Too conservative. The people are behind the times.”

  “Well,” I said, “the roads are nice. I’ve been travelling at record speed since I arrived.”

  “Do you know,” he said, “that Hokkaido has more traffic fatalities per year than anywhere else in Japan?”

  I gave him a wan smile. “So I’ve heard.”

  “I hitchhiked myself one summer, back in the early seventies. It was during the Vietnam War. An American GI jumped ship in Hokkaido, and a friend and I spent the entire summer protecting him, hitchhiking from one town to the next, moving all the time.” He exhaled a cloud of blue death and said, “Most people d
on’t realize how violent the anti-Vietnam protests were in Japan. They had to close the schools down. There were riots. Tear gas. Plastic bullets.” He smiled warmly at the memory of it, sweet with nostalgia. “It was terrible—worse than on American campuses.”

  “Did you take part in the riots? The tear gas, the truncheons, all of that?”

  He gave me a politician’s smile. “I am a private teacher now. It is a very respectable job. I don’t discuss certain parts of my past.”

  “What happened to your friend, the American? The one who went AWOL.”

  “He stayed in Japan illegally for several years, but eventually he went home. They signed an amnesty. He lives in San Francisco now, with his Japanese wife.”

  Katsuya had been to America, as well. “I was married at twenty, which was a mistake. We were too young. I lost my wife. I dropped out, went west—well, east really. You know how it is, to travel west you have to go east. I went to America. My life in Japan was smothering me and I wanted to travel. But I became involved with the wrong people—I was naive, I think—and I ended up broke, without a visa, and stranded halfway across America. Not even halfway. Utah.”

  “Utah?”

  “A family took me in. A Mormon family.”

  But he wasn’t a Mormon and he wasn’t interested in selling me anything, not textbooks or the Word of God. He said, simply, “They were very good people. I always remember how much they helped, and now—” a grin and a shrug “—now I try to pass it along. That’s why I stopped for you. I’m passing it along.”

  “Doling out karma, as it were.”

  “Something like that. So don’t thank me for the ride, you should thank that Mormon family I met twenty-four years ago.”

  The irony was too sharp to bear.